Photo Credit: Image of Lynne Tillman by Heather Sten
Writer Walkthrough: Lynne Tillman on 'Ed Clark. The Big Sweep'
On the occasion of the exhibition 'Ed Clark. The Big Sweep', please join us for a walkthrough with celebrated writer and cultural critic, Lynne Tillman.
Unfolding over two floors of our West 22nd Street gallery, the exhibition spans six decades of Clark’s profoundly influential practice, from his revolutionary use of push brooms as painting tools to his breakthrough introduction of the shaped canvas and beyond.
The exhibition is accompanied by the release of ‘Ed Clark: The Big Sweep’, a comprehensive new book produced by Hauser & Wirth Publishers, which will be available for purchase.
This event is free, however, reservations are recommended.
About Ed Clark
Born in New Orleans in 1926 and raised in Chicago, Clark emerged in the 1950s as a pioneer of the New York School. Over the course of seven decades, his experimentations with pure color, abstract form, and the seductive materiality of paint have yielded an oeuvre of remarkable originality, extending the language of American abstraction. Clark’s breakthroughs have an important place in the story of modern and contemporary art: in the late 1950s he was the first American artist credited with exhibiting a shaped canvas, an innovation that continues to reverberate today. His search for a means to breach the limitations of the conventional paintbrush led him to use a push broom to apply pigment to canvas laid out on the floor. Defying the discreet categories of gestural and hard-edged abstraction, Clark has masterfully interwoven these approaches into a unique form of expressionism.
About Lynne Tillman
Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. Her most recent novel is Men and Apparitions, nominated for a Republic of Consciousness Prize (UK, 2021). Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965–67, with photographs by Stephen Shore; What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Her essays and stories are published in various journals including Frieze, Bomb, Bookforum, Aperture, Artforum, N+1, and in artist’s monographs such as those of Dana Schutz, Steve Locke, Stanley Whitney, Amy Sillman, and Raymond Pettibon, and in museum catalogues such as those from The Whitney Museum of American Art; The ICP Boston, Hammer Museum, and MOCA. Tillman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her most recent work is Mothercare, an autobiographical book-length essay.
